It's 3 am and i don't feel like sleeping. I've been helping a friend to work on his code and now i'm only partially tired. Well, why not continue with my series on the evolution of C#? Let's do it! So, this time i'm going to talk about nullable types . Everybody used them already, but back in .Net 1.0 they didn't exist. How did you represent a "no value present" value? Sure, string can have null, but null is different than empty, right? How do you represent an empty numeric type then? You check if it is bigger than 0? Well for some cases that's just how developers did it. Either that or create a constant value that represents a "no value". But, to me, that is not expressive enough . Basically, a nullable type is only a non-nullable type wrapped in the System.Nullable struct. This is a generic struct, so it makes use of the Generic features of C# 2.0. The struct is very simple, it contains only a HasValue and a Value proper...
Let's have some fun with programming...